Food trading and distribution

[Manfred Belheim]

Since I first played Civ IV I have been surprised and a bit disappointed that this hasn't been included in some way. It seems very odd that cities in the modern era still have to source ALL their own food locally. I'm not sure exactly how it would be implemented in a way that wouldn't be too intrusive, but I think that after Refrigeration is discovered, or perhaps after Supermarkets are built in a city, you should be able to transport food in from other cities or even other civilizations. It seems a shame that ice/tundra cities that could be very productive from mining have to remain as small outposts because they can't grow their own food.

One way to do it would be to introduce a sort of "food bank" that you can access from the city management screen. With this you could remove all or part of the excess food produced in a city and put it in the bank, which could then be used to add to the food in any of your other citues (or only those with supermarkets perhaps), or even traded with other Civilizations for gold or resources. Of course, by default, all cities would still use 100% of their own food so the game would work exactly the same with no added hassle if you didn't choose to take advantage of the option.

I think it would be a nice little extra management option, and would also much better reflect how things are in the real world.

 

[joanne]

I posted a similar thread about this on general discussions, I guess I should have posted it here instead. I was thinking the same thing but was focusing on the early game. After reading your post, I think it could work this way: the ability is activated by researching pottery, but with any unused food wasted due to spoilage until refrigeration is researched and the establishment of "food banks" as you suggested, much like the treasury and /turn

 

[Camikaze]

I think the main reasons why this isn't able to be done currently are that it would probably be pretty complicated, and that it could be used to abuse other features. The latter of these two is probably what causes most concern. If you allow a system whereby you can stack food into a city, then you'd end up with ever civilization having a super-city, at the expense of others, that probably isn't a natural representation of historical urbanisation. So any system that is implemented needs to deal with that.

Having said that, I think there should be some sort of limited system (which would thereby reduce problems of possible abuse), because it's more realistic. I personally liked the discussion in this thread. But maybe I'm biased.

A central food bank is one way to go about, and probably a fairly simple way, but you could always skip that and just go direct for a button in the city screen to divert X food to City X, without having to say divert X food to food bank, and then go to the food bank screen (I assume there would be one) and say divert X food to city. Cut out the middle man.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

I hadn't thought of there being a specific food bank screen as such, just a small section on the city management screen, maybe near all the other sliders, where you can divert excess food into the bank, or withdraw food from it into the city you are currently looking at. I think that would be easier to manage than having to divert food on a city to city basis, one at a time.

Yes it would make it possible to divert food from many cities into just one city (perhaps the capital) and use it to fill that city with many many specialists, churning out great people and research and culture. But then surely that's precisely the sort of thing that happens in large, urban sprawls like London or Paris or Sao Paulo or New York. Or even ancient Rome for that matter. Surely it's quite realistic to have a large, grand city, being fueled by a large civilization? There may well be some issues I'm not thinking of here, in fact there most likely are, but as for it being complicated, I really don't think it would be. It would really just boil down to having an extra slider on the city management screen that could be ignored for the most part.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Oh incidentally... the reason I thought of saving the feature until Refrigeration/Supermarkets was so that it only becomes an option late in the game. This would stop the system being milked for super-cities throughout most of the game so it shouldn't mess with the game balance too much? It would allow late-period industrial cities to be extra productive in desert or ice regions, or allow large capital cities full of many specialists, but wouldn't drastically alter the game in the way that it would if the ability came with Pottery. Tactical placement of cities to take advantage of the resources in the region is a big part of the game and I think a very early "food bank" would mess that up somewhat.

The fact that there seem to be so many thread on the matter would suggest that such an idea would be quite welcome though, in some shape or form

 

[Camikaze]

Yeah, the idea is good, so long as it is either left until late in the game, or limited. This should ensure no game destroying abuse (for example, you could make 3 cities size 50, and pump out culture for a cultural victory).

 

[Manfred Belheim]

I think it would be quite difficult to make 3 size 50 cities unless you had a VERY large civilization. assuming you ould grow the cities to 25 on their own (which would be large enough on its own), then you would still need to supply each city with 50 extra food per turn, or 150 in total. Most cities would only be generating 2 or 3 excess food per turn so that would require 50 or 60 or 70 extra cities.

I don't think it would be open to that much abuse because there simply wouldn't be that much excess food flying around, even available for trade. There would probably be just enough to give a little boost to some cities in infertile areas, but not much more than that.

 

[Camikaze]

Okay, that's a fair point, although I still do think that it could be open to exploitation. Any system in which you give the ability to maximise particular cities (invariably your best cities) allows for a whole lot of mediocre cities, mixed with a whole lot of super cities. This additionally is not a good representation of an empire, which should have multiple power centres.